New Music from Carly Rae Jepsen, Miley Cyrus, and More

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11 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Carly Rae Jepsen, Empress Of, Miley Cyrus, and More

Also stream new releases from Team Dresch and Beck By Kiana Mickles , Walden Green , and Hattie Lindert September 18, 2026 Save this story Save this story

With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Miley Cyrus, Carly Rae Jepsen, Team Dresch, and AZ Chike . Subscribe to Pitchfork’s New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our affiliate links, however, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.)

Carly Rae Jepsen: Day and Night [School Boy/Interscope]

Carly Rae Jepsen is having more fun than everyone. That’s what I took away from Day and Night , her nw 24-track double LP. Split into two halves like one of those convertible slip dresses, the album spans an array of themes including—though not limited to—marrying her hot husband; traveling Europe with her hot husband; having a baby with her hot husband. Given its extensive scope, listening to Day and Night occasionally feels like junk-diving in her demos drawer, but this is Carly Rae Jepsen, so there’s no shortage of shiny baubles for the keen-eyed collector: the scrapbooked travelogue of “Versailles,” an unexpected Gainsbourg homage on “Blue Skies,” and “Amalfi Coast,” as bubbly as a glass of Grand Cru. The only lingering question: Will we get a double album of b-sides, too?

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Empress Of: Dream House [Major Arcana / Giant Music]

The title of Empress Of ’s new album bears a bittersweet significance. In January 2025, the Los Angeles native was one of many Altadena locals whose family homes burned to the ground during the devastating Eaton Fire. Empress Of spent the two years between the blaze and the release of her new album, Dream Home , both physically and spiritually rebuilding: pouring the concrete for a new foundation while undertaking the emotional work of healing after deep loss. It’s a connecting theme on the album, which she executive produced with pop maven Cecile Believe, an ideal tether to Empress Of’s fantastical, club-minded alt-pop. With vocal assists from Blood Orange and her mother, Reina, the musician gives us another glimpse into her prismatic world, swinging the door open on the hard stuff.

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Miley Cyrus: Bass Persuades [Atlantic]

Few modern pop stars know their way around a reinvention quite like Miley Cyrus (understandable, since she’s had an alter ego from minute one). From “Can’t Be Tamed” to the Bangerz era to her 2025 indie rock “concept album” Something Beautiful , Cyrus has indicated she loves nothing more than to try on another facet of her persona. Her new album, Bass Persuades , is her first as just Miley, and rechristens her as club kid-cum-hopeless romantic spending her nights pining and partying in equal measure. Traditional love songs like “Let’s Get Married” share room on the tracklist with grimier cuts like “Different Religion”—the latter thanks largely to the influence of Model/Actriz .

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Team Dresch: Furthermore [Jealous Butcher]

The tone of Furthermore is classic Team Dresch —furious, righteous, and deliciously driving. But singer and bassist Jody Bleyle’s verses have a new urgency to them, certainly informed by the suffocating climate of fear and subjugation facing LGBTQ+ people around the world. “You can’t erase us, we are stars,” Bleyle snarls on the barnstormer ”Growing Underground.” “We've always been here.” Furthermore ’s narrative of generational community as defiance goes beyond just chosen family: “One Song” stars and was choreographed by Twylo Landey, Bleyle’s daughter. Whether biological, spiritual, or both, Team Dresch’s return is a triumph of the many over the few for the ages.

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AZ Chike: No Rest for the Wicked [Warner]

AZ Chike has had motion in the LA rap scene for a minute, but 2024 marked a turning point for the distinctive MC, appearing on Schoolboy Q’s Blue Lips and Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning GNX . His new album, No Rest for the Wicked , drops him in over massive, horn-and-808-heavy beats that would fit right in on a Lamar joint. But AZ’s signature flow and sharp observations on West Coast street politics make sure this record shines on its own. On the banging lead single “Look Like My Mama,” he stands ten toes down across the booth from Tyler, the Creator, channeling the big-band energy of Chromakopia without ever fading into the background.

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Actress: Radical Frame [Ninja Tune]

Actress ’s music is basically a genre within itself, the way the British electronic musician distorts drone, R&B, grime, dubstep, and techno into smoked-out synth trips. His bleary-eyed chords and pneumatic beats are pathways into rain-streaked streets in London, Berlin shows blanketed in thick layers of cigarette haze, and afters where eyes are drooping but no one wants to go home. The producer has always been Black avant-garde, but on Radical Frame he owns this title wholeheartedly. He sets the scene like an independent film auteur, opening with surreal vocals before slinking into a tunnel of static and dark ambient pads. The beats are taut but the music, like most of Actress’s catalog, is spacious, even when the voices of grime MCs Casisdead and Rainy Miller drift in, filling dark crevices with haunted spoken word.

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Beck: Ride Lonesome [Capitol]

Feeling low has long been fertile territory for Beck , one of the great modern bards of loserdom. For Ride Lonesome , he reconvened the same band he made Mutations , Sea Change , and Morning Phase with: Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Jason Falkner. tapping back into that ever-flowing vein to create a windswept collection of folk, country, and alt-rock. Don’t let his hushed, hands-in-the-pockets vocals fool you: songs like the title track and “Disappearing Act” are proper power ballads.

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Beabadoobee: Pylon [Dirty Hit/Interscope]

Whether or not Beabadoobee believes the dance floor to be dead, one thing’s for certain on her new album Pylon : she’s making rock music. After dabbling with a more acoustic register on 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves , Bea Kristi chopped off her hair and leaned back into the grunge, emo, and ‘90s FM rock that gave her poppy 2020 debut its college-radio, bottle-dye charm. The result is a blown-out tour diary that finds inspiration in guitar licks and reverb screech. Across the tracklist, she invites idols and friends who shaped her taste to jump onboard, from Hayley Williams to Turnstile singer Brendan Yates to Title Fight’s Shane Moran. She even got Matty Healy and George Daniel to hop on production duties for “Write Me a Letter.”

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Boy Harsher: Get Mean [Atlantic]

What does it look like for a duo already called Boy Harsher to lean into a darker side? Welcome to the world of Get Mean , the latest album from the duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller. The pair takes their sui generis blend of EBM, darkwave, and industrial music to new, painful places to do justice to the scenario Get Mean was written in: the end of their romantic relationship. But it’s not all endings on Get Mean , which uses the sundown of one romance to introduce the band’s budding interest in new sounds like pedal steel, New Romantic guitar, and a dash of pure pop cheek. Matthews keeps her description of the record simple: it’s “what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.”

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Kristin Hersh: Sugar on Blackstone [Fire]

You can almost hear salty Atlantic waves crashing against rocks on Kristin Hersh ’s Sugar on Blackstone, a raw and spectral collection of indie-rock vignettes rooted in her memories of childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. The album’s title references a street in the city, one she walked many times before moving across America. Working with 50FootWave’s Rob Ahlers and the drummer-cum-cellist Pete Harvey, Hersh keeps her band simple in the name of focusing on complex lyrical reflections on the stains of time, and the liberation of loss. As she says in press materials of centerpiece “101 Run:” “Blissed out and pissed off, lost on some adventure, trying to get home, running down the 101 in the sunshine…don’t think I could have asked much more of life”.

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Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: Second Song [Reprise]

Old meets new on Neil Young ’s latest album: the 50th LP of his career but only his second with his band the Chrome Hearts. Recorded at Shangri La in Malibu and produced by the one and only Lou Adler, some tracks on Second Song —specifically “Casting Me Away From You” and “I’ll Love You Forever”—were written back in the 1960s, while others came to life in new studio sessions. The 11-plus minute title track is one of those new editions, a towering meditation on aging and the changing of the world. “I need to talk to someone, someone who smiles and answers back,” Young mourns over light guitar and banjo strums and an ultra-soft hi-hat. “Someone as old as I am who still remembers some of that.” Thanks to him, it’s all on record.

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Written by Pitchfork Staff

_Originally reported by [Pitchfork](https://pitchfork.com/story/11-new-albums-you-should-listen-to-now-carly-rae-jepsen-empress-of-miley-cyrus/)._